Tuesday afternoon. I was working on a strategy doc for one client — headphones on, phone across the desk, the app said the window was mine — when the thought about a completely different client fired.
Not a distraction. A real thought. Something I'd been circling for a week, about a decision another client needed to make by Friday, that had just clicked into place while I was thinking about something else.
I've had this moment maybe ten thousand times. As a fractional consultant juggling several clients at once, my brain doesn't respect the walls I've built between engagements. It never has. The thought I need is almost always about the file I don't have open.
For years, the choice in that moment was cruel. Chase the new thought and lose the current window. Ignore it and spend the next forty minutes half-present, afraid I'd forget the thing I'd finally figured out.
This week we shipped the answer to that moment.
We call it Understory. It's live in CanopyOS Build 4, on TestFlight now.
The thought I can't afford to lose
Most ADHD productivity content talks about interruptions like they all come from the same place. Slack, notifications, the phone, the dog, the kid. Wall them off. Turn everything to grey. Build a fortress around the window.
That's not the interruption I get.
The interruption I get is a thought about a different client that isn't wrong — it's just early. It arrives while I'm mid-sentence on someone else's problem. Sometimes it's the connection I needed for the doc I'm not writing yet. Sometimes it's a decision I owe a founder by Friday. Sometimes it's the answer to a Slack message I've been avoiding because I didn't have one yet.
The productivity industry has an answer for the first kind of interruption. Block it out. Say no. Draw the line.
There's no answer for the second kind. If you chase the thought, you lose the window you're in. If you ignore the thought, it costs you the client work it belonged to.
Both options are expensive. That's the gap.
What actually happens in fifteen seconds
I'll walk you through what happened Tuesday.
The thought fires. I reach for the phone on the desk. The mic is right on the widget — one tap. The Understory capture screen slides up as a full-screen cover, so the context I'm in stays underneath, undisturbed.
I talk. Ten seconds, twelve, maybe fifteen. Just the thought — not tidy, not sorted, not categorized. The way it came out of my head. "The reason the pricing tier isn't landing is that they're comparing it to a one-off engagement, not a retainer. Reframe the anchor before Friday's call."
I stop. The app says "Held in your understory." A smaller line underneath: "Find it anytime in 🍃 Understory on Today." Then a return button: "Back to your intention →". The app quietly echoes what I said I was working on this morning: "I will build the strategy doc."
Fifteen seconds. Maybe less. The thought is out of my head and in the app. The window is still open. I'm still in the doc.
Transcription runs on-device. Voice never leaves the phone — not to Apple's servers, not to ours, not to anyone's. I'll come back to that in a moment, because for a consultant who talks about clients on the record, it matters more than any feature.
Why the triage waits until night
Here's the design decision I'll defend the hardest.
Understory doesn't ask me to process the captured thought until evening reflection. Not right after I capture it. Not when I finish the current intention. Not when the app notices I've gone idle. Only at the end of the day.
The temptation to build a mid-day triage flow was real. A lot of tools would put a "Process now?" button on that confirmation card. It would probably A/B test well. But it would quietly undo the whole feature.
The moment you show a captured thought back to someone while their current window is still open, they have to make a decision about it. And decisions are the tax ADHD brains pay just to function. The whole reason Understory exists is to remove one decision — chase or ignore — from the middle of a focus session. Showing the thought back mid-day just moves the decision from before capture to after capture. Same cost, different label.
So at evening reflection, and only at evening reflection, the captured thoughts surface. One at a time. Three options only.
- Schedule — it deserves its own window. Pick a date and a duration. The app writes it to your calendar.
- Keep — it's worth holding, not acting on yet. Move on.
- Release — it served its purpose by being caught. Let it go.
Three options. Nothing more. And on the nights where processing anything at all feels like too much, there's a Clear later escape hatch. The whole triage surface stays under a minute on a heavy day.
For the small share of captured thoughts you genuinely need to act on before evening — copy the transcript, paste it into an email or DM, done. You don't need a new mid-day flow. You need to know the transcript is right there, selectable, one tap away.
Voice stays on the device
For anyone doing client work, this part matters.
Understory transcribes with Apple's Speech framework, on-device recognition required. That's a specific flag that tells iOS: this audio does not leave the device. Not to Apple's servers, not to ours, not to anyone's. If the phone is offline, transcription still works.
On-device transcription in 2026 handles clean speech well. It gets a little less confident when an ADHD brain dumps three half-sentences and a pivot into ten seconds — which, honestly, is when Understory is doing exactly what it should. We shipped it that way anyway, because the alternative was streaming client-adjacent thoughts to a server, and that isn't a compromise a consulting app can make.
The good news: Apple shipped a new on-device transcription engine at WWDC earlier this month. It handles rambling speech noticeably better. The next CanopyOS build swaps it in — same privacy commitment, sharper transcripts.
Delete a clip's audio anytime — the transcript stays. Swipe further to delete the whole item, transcript and all. The privacy footer inside the Understory list says it in one line: Voice recordings stay on this device. Delete a clip's audio anytime — the transcript stays.
If you're capturing thoughts about clients, teams, deals, or anything that lives under an NDA, this is the design principle you want.
Coming up — Build 4 is on TestFlight
CanopyOS Build 4 is live on TestFlight right now, with Understory shipped end-to-end. Public beta is open with 18 spots left, first-come. If your brain works like mine — the ADHD brain juggling client work is who we built the whole app for — install and see what fifteen seconds inside the window feels like.
Install on TestFlight — 18 spots left in the public beta.
If the cap fills before you get in, join the waitlist and I'll pull you into the next batch.
The canopy protects what's under it. Starting with the thought you can't afford to lose.